Serial ports were THE standard interface for almost every piece of computer-controlled industrial equipment up until a few years ago. Hell, it still *is* the standard interface for most of that stuff. The good-ol' serial port is absolutely reliable, easy to program, and cheap.

I'm guessing that they were using it as a simple way to "test" the iPhone prototype hardware. It's about a billion times easier to get data in/out of a serial port than it is to get data in/out of a USB port. USB requires a whole software stack to do anything useful - serial ports "just work". Comparatively.

Non-engineers don't understand engineering. This is not news. If you're talking about a desktop PC, you can throw every port at it. If the device is small and has a bunch of table-stakes features it has to support, you lose some features that seem like "common sense", and have to redesign connectors to squeeze more functionality out of them than the standard supports. Some connectors (like rj-11/45) just won't fit on a phone. Other ones (micro USB) will fit, but don't work well enough, don't transmit as much data or power, weaken the case or wear out too soon. The USB or SD standard could be inefficient in power usage, or demand additional complexity and security requirements that the connector doesn't support in hardware just to keep the port from being a malware vector. An SD card slot takes up room in the case that could be used for battery or cooling.

If you want your phone to look like a slice of sourdough bread and weigh a pound, with a huge brick to charge it, and have it wear out after 16 months, then you don't have any design constraints. If you want an iPhone 5, you have to make sacrifices.

Look at the Macbook Pros: retina display v non-retina display. Note the configurations available in the retina models. Using a retina display informed the rest of the design: SSD only, more powerful config available only in the 15" model, no ethernet port on the retina models, all made possible/necessary by the retina display and the thinner case.

mccallcl:Non-engineers don't understand engineering. This is not news. If you're talking about a desktop PC, you can throw every port at it. If the device is small and has a bunch of table-stakes features it has to support, you lose some features that seem like "common sense", and have to redesign connectors to squeeze more functionality out of them than the standard supports. Some connectors (like rj-11/45) just won't fit on a phone. Other ones (micro USB) will fit, but don't work well enough, don't transmit as much data or power, weaken the case or wear out too soon. The USB or SD standard could be inefficient in power usage, or demand additional complexity and security requirements that the connector doesn't support in hardware just to keep the port from being a malware vector. An SD card slot takes up room in the case that could be used for battery or cooling.

If you want your phone to look like a slice of sourdough bread and weigh a pound, with a huge brick to charge it, and have it wear out after 16 months, then you don't have any design constraints. If you want an iPhone 5, you have to make sacrifices.

Look at the Macbook Pros: retina display v non-retina display. Note the configurations available in the retina models. Using a retina display informed the rest of the design: SSD only, more powerful config available only in the 15" model, no ethernet port on the retina models, all made possible/necessary by the retina display and the thinner case.

hey dawg, i heard you like phones so we put an rj-11 on your phone so you could hook a phone up to your phone and phone while you phone.

also, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. plenty of phones have rj-11 jacks on them. i think i have a few in my basement.

Those ports were probably never meant for a final product, what you are seeing is pretty typical of a "development board", or "eval board", an engineering sample that allows for rapid prototyping of a design for testing and evaluation purposes.

last job i worked at 'dev prototypes' were basically a collection of OTS components and a couple of in-house boards done up at a fab-shop off-site. very clean. very neat. easy to modify properly as we broke everything down to modular boards(wifi, interface, display, etc).

didn't get to work on the iphones tho, they went with a different driver chip for their touch sensors.

I don't think anybody's pointing fingers and laughing at stupid Apple for making such a huge stupid iPhone. I think everyone understands there's a prototyping phase first before the assembly lines wind up to crank out gadgets for the end user. It's just neat to see that COTS iPhone, and think about the development and prototyping process.

That "iPhone Prototype" is a standard ARM development system with a display. They ALL have those ports on them since they can 1) host USB, 2) client USB and use Ethernet for communication/debugging since most of them come with a Linux image in NAND/NOR flash memory.

Heh, well I have to check the facts on that one! Seriously though, it's amazing how things change in 20 years:

CPU: First-gen Newton had a 20 mhz ARM processor. The iPhone 5 has a dual-core 1 ghz ARM processor.Battery: Hard to estimate, but from googling around it seems the Newton's battery life was about the same as a modern smartphone.Memory and storage: The first Newton only had 640 KB RAM and -- get this -- no flash memory! Yikes, you'd better not let your battery die. The Newton OS itself was stored in ROM. The iPhone 5 has 1 GB RAM and a minimum 16 GB of flash.

Heh, well I have to check the facts on that one! Seriously though, it's amazing how things change in 20 years:

CPU: First-gen Newton had a 20 mhz ARM processor. The iPhone 5 has a dual-core 1 ghz ARM processor.Battery: Hard to estimate, but from googling around it seems the Newton's battery life was about the same as a modern smartphone.Memory and storage: The first Newton only had 640 KB RAM and -- get this -- no flash memory! Yikes, you'd better not let your battery die. The Newton OS itself was stored in ROM. The iPhone 5 has 1 GB RAM and a minimum 16 GB of flash.